We are writing as a group of world citizens to tell you that we are saddened by yet another police murder of a young person, Alexis Grigoropoulos. We do not see this as an isolated incident by one “bad cop” but as the direct result of a oppressive police force and repressive state. Alexis’ murder sparked a fire in Greece and has touched many all over the world. We are heartened by the response of our Greek comrades and write this letter in support of what has become a large-scale popular uprising in Greece with support worldwide. We applaud its principles and its targets – the police themselves, and the state institutions that create and feed the system of violence and oppression that they enforce. We will stand strong in whatever ways we can with the people of Greece who are making their voices heard. This struggle does not belong to Greece alone. The problems of Greece are problems of a deeply repressive capitalist world order. What is happening on the Greek barricades is happening elsewhere and everywhere. We hope that the fruits of our struggles and uprisings will yield a better and more just world for all. The time has come and the people will not back down.
In solidarity:
The Alexander Berkman Social Club
AK Press
Revolutionary Autonomous Communities
Cop Watch Los Angeles – Guerrilla Chapter
Friendly Fire Collective
Hog River Collective
PM Press
Katharine Wallerstein
Devin Hoff
Paul Dalton
Chris Carlsson
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Chuck Morse
David Barkham
Cindy Milstein
Lani Riccobuono
Peter McLaren
John Tillman
Sara Smith
Roger Leisner
Landon Godwin
Chuck J
Payam Shahfari
Carlos Torrano
Solidad Decosta
Angel Martinez
Mesha Monge-Irizarry
[Endorsers as of December 25, 2008]
If you would like to add your name to the list signers, please write: devilhoof@devinhoffplatform.com
Revolution by the Book will periodically post excerpts from new (and older) AK Press books. This one comes from the book we recently co-published with Critical Resistance: Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex. It’s a quick glimpse of a powerful piece written by Dylan Rodríguez that frames the prison industrial complex as a form of domestic warfare. Dylan is an associate professor in the Ethnic Studies department at UC Riverside. For more on the crucial work that Critical Resistance does, check out their website.
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We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented state-organized human capture and state-produced physical/social/psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal apartheid and proto-apartheid that are being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This condition presents a profound crisis—and political possibility—for people struggling against the white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and physical evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization, and US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately “global” way, it is nothing short of unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) when there are overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive, declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and nearby geographies of “home.”
This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of the political and institutional logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly the “establishment” left that is tethered (for better and worse) to the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of government-proctored non-profit organizations.
It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a political power structure that I wish to address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive movements and organizations within the US establishment left (of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is, the left’s willingness to fundamentally tolerate—and accompanying unwillingness to abolish—the institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence “normal” manifestations within the domestic “homeland” of the Homeland Security state.
AK Press had a presence at the First Annual Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair held last weekend at the venerableSouthern California Library in South Central LA. The event was a huge success, thanks to the hard work of the bookfair’s tireless organizers, attendees ready to dialogue and learn, and a spirit of resistance that seems to grow stronger everyday.
The following photos (all by Chuck Morse) will give you a feel for the event.
ABOVE: The crowded scene outside the library between workshops. Attendance at the event greatly exceeded the organizers expectations. It was packed! There were easily 600 to 700 people circulating at any given time.
ABOVE: A discussion in the Library’s courtyard.
ABOVE: People chatting between workshops in the Library’s “Reading Room.” (more…)
The point was to fight Franco’s dictatorship by any means possible. Why not use a printing press? That’s how five Spanish political refugees headed by José Martínez saw it in Paris in 1961. And that’s how the Ruedo Ibérico imprint was born, which later became a magazine and bookstore that existed until 1980. The press published works by Hispanophiles (Jackson, Thomas, Gibson, etc.), essayists, and protagonists of the Spanish Civil War who were unable to put out their works in Spain. Almost 150 titles were released. Now, the publisher Backlist will annually re-issue three of the most emblematic texts from this historic catalog, with new introductions, bibliographies, and corrections when necessary. The work began with El eco de los pasos, the memoirs of Juan García Oliver, anarchist and former republican Minister. Another classic work on the background of the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Labyrinth by English Hispanophile Gerald Brennan, will follow in its wake this January.
“It’s an arrangment with Marianne Brull, Ruedo Ibérico’s editor and current representative: they gave us the titles so that we can re-release them with additional content,” said Daniel Cladera, Blacklist’s editorial director. Brull penned the prologue of Brenan’s book, which will contain a new bibliography, index of names, and maps. Historian Bernat Muniesa added commentary on García Oliver’s work.
But time has left its mark, especially on a catalog born of such strong ideologically convictions. “Some texts have either been surpassed or are very enmeshed in the anarcho-syndicalist or communists worlds from which they emerged, even though they’re still invaluable,” Cladera stated, pointing to one legendary book that is already ready for republication: Diary of the War in Spain by Mijail Koktsov, one of the best Russian journalists during the conflict, who was also probably Stalin’s eyes and ears, until the Soviet leader had him detained in 1938 and then executed four years later.
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This essay first appeared in El País, on December 6, 2008. Translation by Comrade C.
The following video shows Juan García Oliver speaking (in Spanish) about the era of pistolerismo in Barcelona prior to the Spanish Civil War:
Benjamin Dangl wrote the following essay. Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press), which includes many stories of workers, families, and activists throughout Latin America working together to build a new world in the face of economic crises. This essay first appeared in the online magazine Upside Down World, where Ben is editor (and founder).
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When the 250 workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago were told that the plant was shutting down, they decided to take matters into their own hands. On Friday, December 5, the workers occupied their factory in an act that echoes the sit-down strikes of the 1930s in the US and the occupation of factories during the 2001 crisis in Argentina.
“They want the poor person to stay down. We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere until we get what’s fair and what’s ours,” Silvia Mazon, 47, a formerly apolitical mother and worker at the factory for thirteen years, told the New York Times. “They thought they would get rid of us easily, but if we have to be here for Christmas, it doesn’t matter.”
The workers are demanding that they be paid their vacation and severance pay, or that the factory continue its operations. They were given only three days’ notice of the shut-down, not the 60 days’ notice which is required under federal and state law.
On Friday, fifty of the workers at the plant—taking shifts in the occupation—sat on chairs and pallets inside the factory and were supplied with blankets, sleeping bags, and food from supporters. Throughout the takeover, workers have been cleaning the building and shoveling snow while protesters gathered in solidarity outside waving signs and chanting.
The occupation of the factory—which produces heating efficient vinyl windows and sliding doors—is taking place in the midst of a massive recession, with the rate of unemployment in the US at a fifteen-year high, and with 600,000 manufacturing jobs lost in this year alone. As another indicator of the economic crisis, one in ten Americans—a record of 31.6 million—now use food stamps.
The factory workers are protesting the fact that the Bank of America received $25 billion in the recent $700 billion government bailout, and then went ahead and cut off credit to Republic Windows and Doors, resulting in the subsequent closing of the factory.
“The bank has the money in this situation,” said Mark Meinster, a representative of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, the union the factory workers belong to. “And we are demanding that Bank of America release the money owed to workers who have earned it and are entitled to it.” On Monday, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich announced that, in support of the workers, the state will temporarily stop doing business with Bank of America. (more…)
Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing series of “Recommended Readings,” we asked AK author Chris Carlssonto share his thoughts about the best books on the history and politics of the San Francisco Bay Area. Chris is the author or editor of numerous books, including Nowtopia, Critical Mass, The Political Edge, and After the Deluge. Below is his response to our question. Thanks, Chris!
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There is no book comparable to Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (UC Press). Brechin’s history is rooted in geography and political economy and takes us from the founding myths of the city up to contemporary power structures. A good augmentation of Brechin’s analysis is a collection of broad-ranging “contrarian” essays published in1998 by City Lights Books, Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture(ed. James Brook, Chris Carlsson and Nancy J. Peters). A later volume based on the quixotic 2003 mayoral campaign of Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez called The Political Edge (City Lights Foundation, 2004) continues the contrarian analyses of Reclaiming San Francisco and looks broadly at dissident politics in early twenty-first century San Francisco.
For a study of the city’s growth since the late 1960s, particularly the planning and redevelopment processes, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester Hartmann is indispensable. Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg closely examines the gutting of urban life in the U.S. that became particularly visible during the Dot-com boom and bust in San Francisco, 1999-2000. In The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself, Philip L. Fradkin gives a scintillating account of the disaster and how the powers-that-be used it to unravel the unusual working class city government of the time under the Union Labor Party.
On December 13th, Humboldt county, CA, will experience it’s first anarchist bookfair. The all-day event will take place in the Manila Community Center (1611 Peninsula Drive, Acrata, CA, 95521) from 10am to 6pm, and is being presented by Humboldt Grassroots. As the group describes both the locale and the event:
Located on the physical and psychic edge of the disintegrating American Empire, Humboldt has a reputation as a zone of resistance, where free people have fought bitterly against encroachments of federal and local authorities in their autonomy. We present: a literary celebration of this spirit of freedom, which has magnetically attracted rebels, eccentrics and misfits of all types to mountainous Northern California for generations. The bookfair will bring radical speakers, publishers and artists from across the West Coast and America to mingle behind the “Redwood Curtain” and cross-pollinate with local groups and organizations. Hard-to-find, limited-run books, zines and literature from West Coast authors and distributors focusing on anarchist and anti-authoritarian approaches to vital struggles including ecology, labor, racism, patriarchy, prisons and the fight for freedom in an increasingly repressive society, will be made available to the public.
For more info, visit their website. In the meantime, check out the following interview with the event organizers, conducted by AK collective member Victoria, a recent transplant from Humboldt herself:
This upcoming bookfair is pretty significant, in that it is the first Anarchist Bookfair to ever take place in Humboldt. Where did the idea/motivation to host an anarchist bookfair in your neighborhood come from? Why have an anarchist bookfair and not, say, a “radical bookfair” or an “alternative media bookfair” or an “independent press bookfair”?
Humboldt County anarchists have been known to pack 12-20 kids into a veggie oil run school bus and make the yearly 16 hour trip to the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair. We sit around our kitchen tables, easels, typewriters, garden plots, libraries and under eucalyptus and redwood canopies singing and strategizing how to connect with anarchists all over in order to dismantle imperialism. We want EVERYONE in our neighborhood to hear our songs of struggle and sing themselves. We’ve come to realize the importance of doing a specifically anarchist bookfair because the spirit of freedom and resistance in this community is so strong. (more…)
For all of you beautiful liars out there—Hip Mama is gonna be breaking some fresh ground and doing a Short Story Contest.
First Prize is $100, your Short Story as the feature in issue 44 the Creativity issue with a profile and picture of your brilliant self, AND a Lifetime Subscription to Hip Mama which we don’t even sell any more.
Ten runners up will get a four issue subscription, their names and story titles in the zine and their full stories will be published online.
What about ?
Write any short story you want just make sure there is a Mama in there somewhere. It can be any genre, any style, from any ol’ point of View, only rule for content is: THERE MUST BE A MAMA IN THE STORY.
How long?
Keep it under 2500 words.
Where do I send my fantastic story?
The best way is to attach it as a word document and email the story to hipmamazine@gmail.com. Put in the subject line Short Story Submission and your name. Or mail it old school to P.O Box 12525, Portland OR 97212.
How much?
$25 per story entry fee, or splurge and for $60 and I will mail back your story with comments.
You can pay at www.hipmamashop.com just include your receipt # in your e-mail, or mail a check with your entry.
How long do I have?
Deadline for Entries- April 1st 2009.
Comments will be mailed by May 30th at the latest.
And don’t forget that Hip Mama makes an awesome Holiday Gift.
We, the Anarchists!: A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937
by Stuart Christie
AK Press is pleased to announce that we’ve recently published a new edition of Stuart Christie’s We, the Anarchists. It is by far the best, and most detailed, study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) available, and we are very excited that Stuart has given us the chance to make it available to a wider audience.
As some readers of this blog might already know, the FAI was a group of twentieth-century Spanish militants dedicated to keeping Spain’s largest labor union, the CNT, on a revolutionary, anarcho-syndicalist path. That effort has garnered both praise and criticism within and outside the anarchist movement. There is no better book with which to understand the organization’s complex history and the crucial issues it raised, many of which are as relevant today as they were more than eighty years ago when the FAI was born.
This book is essential reading for any serious student of anarchist history and strategy. Below, we offer a review by Iain McKay (which we lifted from the Anarchist Writers blog).
This is an important book. Christie has done a great service in producing this study of the FAI. One of the most famous and most misrepresented anarchist organisations of all time, this book is essential for refuting these misrepresentations and for understanding the successes and failure of revolutionary anarchism in Spain during the 1930s.
The main aspect of this work is its demolition of what can be called the “bullying militant” analysis of the FAI and its influence in the CNT. Basically, so this myth goes, the FAI (usually a “highly centralised and secret” FAI at that) managed to take control over the CNT in the early 1930s, expelled the moderate leadership and pursued a revolutionary line, helping to destabilise the Republic and accelerate the rise of Franco. How the FAI actually did this is usually left very vague. The Trotskyist Felix Morrow, for example, asserted that “Spanish Anarchism had in the FAI a highly centralised party apparatus through which it maintained control of the CNT,” without any references or evidence (unsurprisingly, this assertion has become a standard Leninist “fact”). Other historians have painted similar pictures.
Christie presents more than enough evidence that this “standard” picture of the FAI is false, a product of historians “cynically or unintentionally distorting the available historical evidence.” He stresses that what passes for analysis of Spanish Anarchism and the FAI is supported more “by ideological conviction rather than history or investigation of the phenomena of social life” (Christie quoting Chomsky). (more…)
Everything in the warehouse—books, DVDs, CDs, shirts, zines, pamphlets, etc—25% off.
Plus, tons of sale items for $5 or less.
Bring your friends! Free snacks and drinks. Music and raffles!
Viernes, 5/12/2008, 4-10 PM
¡Entrada gratis!
¡Apoya a las editoriales independientes libertarias!
Toda la bodega – libros, DVDs, CDs, camisetas, zines, panfletos, etc. – con un 25% de descuento.
Además, muchos articulos en liquidación por $5 o menos.
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AK Press
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b/t MLK and San Pablo – near 19th St. BART and West Grand Exit of 80/980
For more info contact:
AK Press at 510.208.1700, akpress@akpress.org or visit www.akpress.org
All events at AK Press are wheelchair accessible.
We are writing as a group of world citizens to tell you that we are saddened by yet another police murder of a young person, Alexis Grigoropoulos. We do not see this as an isolated incident by one “bad cop” but as the direct result of a oppressive police force and repressive state. Alexis’ murder sparked a fire in Greece and has touched many all over the world. We are heartened by the response of our Greek comrades and write this letter in support of what has become a large-scale popular uprising in Greece with support worldwide. We applaud its principles and its targets – the police themselves, and the state institutions that create and feed the system of violence and oppression that they enforce. We will stand strong in whatever ways we can with the people of Greece who are making their voices heard. This struggle does not belong to Greece alone. The problems of Greece are problems of a deeply repressive capitalist world order. What is happening on the Greek barricades is happening elsewhere and everywhere. We hope that the fruits of our struggles and uprisings will yield a better and more just world for all. The time has come and the people will not back down.
